AliExpress brain

    Only AliExpress could take Bachelor’s Day, a student holiday with a touch of sadness, and turn it into International Shopping Day in a few years. For several years now, 11.11 has been easily and naturally competing with Black Friday, capturing the whole world. Of course, the retail leader of such strength and such potential could not ignore modern technology. Recently, AliExpress has not only got carried away with fashionable gadgets and applications, but also began to earn a lot from them. Lots of. Recently, our company Fibrum created the platform that served as the basis for the AliExpress virtual store. In this article I will talk about the features of this platform of VR-stores. By the way, glasses for our platform are not nnnada. Almost.



    First experiments with a different reality


    Many people know that on November 11, the Chinese, carried away by the magic of numbers, celebrate Bachelor’s Day, as this date brings together four units (11.11). In recent years, more and more sales in online stores have been held on Bachelor’s Day, and on November 11th becomes Chinese Black Friday. Therefore, our joint project with AliExpress was dedicated to the day of online shopping in the Middle Kingdom.

    AliExpress itself has already tested VR stores in 2016. The commercial success of this experiment last year's Black Friday was phenomenal - 8 million people visited VR stores. Not surprisingly, AliExpress decided to continue in the same vein, only now in Russia.


    This is what AliExpress VR stores look like for users from Australia, America and Japan.

    The first Alibaba project was slightly different from the Russian one in that it was implemented using augmented rather than virtual reality technology. About the project, you can see the CNN report.

    On November 3, 2017, we carried out a trial launch of the AliExpress virtual store in our country. And on November 7, the Tmall store in virtual reality worked at its full potential: in 11 Russian cities, ads with QR codes were placed, by which it was possible to go to the store with VR goods on AliExpress.

    Why AliExpress chose Fibrum


    In 2015, our company won the joint Skolkovo and AliExpress startup competition, and we got the right to place Fibrum Pro VR helmets on the Chinese trading platform. So began our cooperation with AliExpress. It was successful, and it became decisive when choosing a contractor for creating virtual stores in Russia.

    By the way, in 2016, Alibaba founder Jack Ma had a personal meeting with Fibrum CEO Ilya Flaks during the World Internet Forum in China. We donated our VR helmet to Jack Ma. Although the conversation was not very long, during this time Ilya and Jack managed to talk about our products.


    What does a VR store look like?


    By scanning the QR code or by direct link, the buyer enters the store, selects one of the three departments (virtual rooms Technique, For Children, and Fashion) and finds himself among the virtual products.

    The user moves around the virtual store, directing the look in the right direction and activating the button with the pictogram of the legs.



    To select a product, the user holds his gaze on it, which causes the retycle to load (the pointer in the center of the look), after which a close-up scene opens - a detailed view of the product and its characteristics with the ability to twist it along the X axis, and also add to the basket.
    In fact, the user does not need a virtual reality helmet (access is possible from a normal browser), but for a more complete immersion in VR, I would still recommend wearing a helmet - it’s so interesting. The main thing is that the helmet is compatible with your phone.


    Buyers - Gamers


    To captivate the buyer, we used the mechanics of the game and came up with different "chips".
    For each action (even the entrances and exits from the rooms) the user is awarded gamification points.

    If you catch a cat that “walks” on Tmall, you can “earn” a $ 2-4 coupon. You don’t have to run around the rooms for animals. There is no soundtrack in our store, and only the cat gives out its presence with another meow. When the user hears the "cat", he must "catch" his gaze to get a discount.


    For pointing the smartphone at the glass cube, which is in every room, the user received an invitation to the offline event Tmall, which was held in Moscow at the Atrium shopping center. By collecting points, the user gains a special status that can be shared on social networks.

    A Tinkoff chest was also placed in the rooms: by opening it, the buyer can receive a bonus for the purchase of goods.

    Technical implementation


    Colleagues from AliExpress insisted that we do everything in the browser, since it is much more convenient than the traditional model with the creation of a separate application, which can only be used with a virtual reality helmet. Web-VR is more accessible, and this has become a decisive factor. Then it seemed almost impossible. Moreover, in the month that we were given everything about everything.
    We took a chance, although we realized that no one had made such decisions and there would be many problems along the way.

    Based on the results of the consultation with AliExpress specialists, we wrote a technical task, as part of which we began development. From AliExpress we received photos of goods and based on them we made 3D models. In general, the 3D modeling process was pretty standard, except for the need to convert the resulting files to a special format that is used in the framework. For example, this is how a room model with objects located in it looks.


    On the client side, the design of the hall and rooms, pop-up windows with gaming achievements and some other graphic elements were also created. The technical implementation of the project was completely on our side.

    Eight specialists worked on the platform: three designers, two developers, a tester, a product manager and an art director. The product manager oversaw interaction with AliExpress. The art director was responsible for the visual component.

    As a result, our team got a very complex technological solution with several rooms, gamification, with VR mode in the browser from any phone.  

    The platform for the AliExpress VR store is designed from scratch using the A-Frame HTML framework for creating virtual reality sites (a technology also known as Web-VR). The main rendering technology is WebGL.

    Since virtual reality in the project for AliExpress is implemented as a web application running in a browser, resources for it are allocated differently. And since there is no need to create heavy graphic elements, its performance is higher than that of classic VR solutions.

    To track human movements, our solution for AliExpress uses only internal phone sensors: an accelerometer and a gyroscope. We also took into account the existence of phones without a gyroscope and circumvented this limitation by implementing control of finger movements on the screen. This project does not imply tracking systems for the position of a person in space.

    I have often heard complaints from users who have tried VR for delays when turning their heads and a fuzzy image. All this is not related to the AliExpress store, as it was developed on the basis of Web-VR and is not an application that is installed directly from the store. The insufficient distance between the objects (also a frequent complaint of VR users) in this project is again not a big problem: we found this at the testing stage, slightly rearranged the objects on the shelves, and it became comfortable.

    Project weaknesses and our main “rake” are incomplete Web-VR support by browsers of modern smartphones. Web-VR is still actively developing, is being finalized, and some features can be implemented using polyfills.. Accordingly, one hundred percent functional functionality cannot be guaranteed and must be thoroughly tested.

    Results and Prospects


    AliExpress says that if our solution is successful, they will consider launching full-fledged virtual stores in other countries, since opening and maintaining stores in a new format is several times cheaper than regular points of sale, and you can place them without reference to shopping centers or shops.

    Fibrum also gained very valuable experience in developing Web-VR projects, which can later be scaled to other projects. We hope that the example of AliExpress will inspire Russian companies to more actively use virtual reality as a sales channel.
    In the meantime, we are working on another project - the launch of a new application in which you can choose an emotion and experience it, setting off on an adventure in virtual reality. Of course, we will also tell about it to readers of Habr. But next time.

    Also popular now: